Case puts DeLay back in control of the news

House leader may have reaped political benefits

WASHINGTON - House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was on the defensive last week, busily responding to a series of news reports questioning his political fund raising and overseas travel.

But by week's end, DeLay, R-Sugar Land, was back in control of the news as the chief strategist behind legislative efforts to have Congress intervene in the right-to-die court case of Terry Schiavo.

"This is not a political issue. This is life and death," DeLay insisted during the weekend.

Regardless, DeLay may have reaped political benefits.

Congressional action on the case took attention away from the ethics uproar that was making some GOP House members uneasy, and DeLay fortified his standing with the Republican Party's base of religious conservatives, who objected passionately to the decision to remove Schiavo's life-sustaining feeding tube.

DeLay shunned television producers' requests for interviews about the ethics questions early last week. By Friday he was front-and-center before the news cameras with each turn in the Schiavo story, outlining the Republicans' moral, legal and legislative strategy.

"The legal issues, I grant everyone, are complicated. But the moral ones are not,," DeLay told reporters.

He cited conservative credentials to support his reason for pushing the issue.

"I think I do have a reputation for being conservative, and I will stand on my philosophy against anybody," he said.

But there is the other side of DeLay, the hard-charging partisan side, that has caused his relatively late entry into the seven-year Schiavo case to be viewed through a political prism.

"All of us who watch Tom DeLay closely know that Tom DeLay is always looking to push the issues that have the sharpest angles for his Republican base," he said.

That drive for partisan advantage was behind DeLay's political fund-raising efforts in the 2002 state House races. The campaign led to a congressional redistricting that increased the number of House GOP seats.

Benefits may be fleeting

But the political action committee created by DeLay to raise money for the state races is the subject of civil and criminal cases pending in Texas. His political activities also led to three admonitions from the House ethics committee last year.

Indeed, any political benefits for DeLay from the Schiavo case may prove temporary.

In a national ABC News poll taken Sunday, two-thirds of Americans said elected officials were using the Schiavo case more for political advantage than out of concern for the woman.

GOP pollster David Winston, however, said the Schiavo matter played to DeLay's political strengths: "Tom DeLay has a core set of beliefs. If there was an issue that represents that core set of beliefs, this was it."

"On the House side, he is widely perceived as being somebody that you want on these issues and he is relatively comfortable with them," said Gary Bauer, president of American Values.